INTRO
First things first…

I am honoured to announce Nooks is now sponsoring Mastering Sales Development!

Nooks are the virtual sales floor that helps SDRs get 5x more prospects on the phone and allows leaders to help coach and develop their team to be even more amazing! Check them out.

EXTRA
Second thing!

This will be the last edition for the year! Thank you so much for your support over the last 22 issues.

When I started this newsletter, I aimed to educate and inform all of you about the current Go to Market trends and to get some of the best operators in B2B SaaS involved and communicating to YOU.

I will continue to do this in 2024.

The guests are all lined up until the start of April.

Want to be involved as an interviewee in the Spring/Summer? Drop me a message.

See you back here on January 5th 2024!

STUFF
Content of the week

• 8 Pillars of an ABM Strategy

• How to book VP+ meetings

• Outbound Strategy Cheatsheet

THOUGHTS
What am I seeing this week: Not all leads are created equal

It's so important you do NOT call everyone who went to an event.

Why not? There is a tendency for organisations to pressure SDR teams to call every lead regardless of quality from events, conferences, webinars, etc.

But, again, Why?

There is no ROI, especially as we all know of those attendees at events who are specifically there to collect merch.

.......You know who you are.

Less is more in this regard. There needs to be demographic and firmographic lead scoring in place for leads. Most importantly, SDR must be focused on a named account model.

And only focus on following up on those leads. Only those that meet a certain lead threshold should go anywhere near follow-up.

Everything else? Tough. They aren't qualified yet; put them in nurture campaigns and try harder.

So when building your top-of-funnel, ensure you have a lead scoring system; otherwise, your teams are just spinning plates for no return on investment, and no one is happy.

Do you disagree? Let me know

For those new to the newsletter and like what you are seeing, please click on the subscribe button, and you’ll receive this top-quality newsletter in your inbox every Friday morning!

INTERVIEW
Six Questions of the Week: Remington Rawlings

This week, we have one of the best operators in the Rev Ops world. Remington Rawlings is joining the newsletter! Remmington’s journey is remarkable, culminating with running his start-up, Oneview, full-time. Check it out!

As a way of quick introduction….why did you choose Rev ops?

I was a full-time student as a philosophy major at Utah Valley University in Orem, UT, while doing a full-time SDR role at Workfront when it started. Having had two other SDR jobs at InsideSales[dot]com and Lucidchart, where I had seen a lot of success, I noticed some significant challenges in developing processes for the SDR side. My mid-term project in my business ethics class was to do a service project (at work, preferably). So I went to the VP of Sales Ops and the VP of SDRs and said, “Hey 👀 what about I do this service project to find a way to help out here?” They readily agreed because I was the top-performing SDR and had a good brand within the organization of helping newcomer SDRs get ramped up. Still, I also had already given lots of help and feedback in ways that helped us build more pipeline. As I got into the project, I found many things to fix. Honestly, it was depressing because I had no clue what to do. How could I go to them and share everything I found, knowing no one on their team had the bandwidth to implement these things? I was sitting outside my class eating Chinese food, stewing over this problem… and I got a fortune cookie that changed my life: “Understanding the nature of change changes nature.” Meaning that when we understand change, it can change us, too. Shortly after, it dawned on me that I needed to be the one to implement these changes. So, I went to the leadership team with my proposal to create a new role for me, and a month later, I could join the ops team. From that, starting a consultancy, leading a Rev Ops team pre-Adobe acquisition at Workfront, and then as the head of Marketing Ops for Kustomer, and then Rev Ops at Snowflake, the thing that kept me in Rev Ops through all the ups and downs were two things:
1. People - the job I have makes or breaks if people get to succeed in the hard roles they have in sales. I want and love the chance to be the backbone for successful processes and decisions that have a mile-wide and deep downstream impact. The “people matter” mantle motivates me deeply, and Rev Ops facilitates that passion.
2. Entrepreneurship - running a business means problem-solving. I had never heard of or found a better job that fully prepared me holistically to have the skills needed to do the array of entrepreneurial work that Rev Ops gave me.

In your mind, why do we continue to see friction within Go-to-markets?

Over the past five years, I have done a lot of profound work on the silos that exist in Marketing, SDRs, Sales, and Success and the supporting functions of Ops, Enablement and Finance who work behind the scenes. I see patterns across organisations that vary widely regarding root causes. Still, some consistent themes revolve around these themes:

• Inherent Strategy Differences: There are many vantage points to examine a process. Take MQLs. Marketing thinks of MQLs as the edge of their reach into revenue a lot of the time. Site visitor >> form fill >> backend routing and scoring >> reporting on response metrics. An outbound SDR team sees an MQL as the start of their process. It’s an input among many for the types of prospects they spend time developing relationships with, and when those MQLs feel like the quality is lacking, it creates tension because the push to “act on MQLs” sounds more like “do something that distracts from their quota.” When marketing and sales leaders talk about resolving this tension, they are already too many layers down from the high-level process that should be the main focus.

• Another common problem once you achieve alignment, especially with organisations who have legacy tech debt from building Salesforce / other tech stack configurations on top of each other over and over, is you have a tough time resolving previous discrepancies to get to a clean slate. A blank page is often more ideal, but you can't do that. So teams face the dilemma of how to dump the bad cargo of tech debt in systems and report off the plane while they build the aircraft….while it's flying.

• Lastly, I truly believe, after seeing many well-meaning but very inexperienced people out there, that there is just a sincere desire to do the right things that are stifled by not having had the chance to learn best practices or see what good looks like enough even to know where to begin to create lasting alignment.

So, what should the main focus be?

It depends on your GTM model (land and expand, PLG, Enterprise SaaS, etc.), but the main focus should likely be centred first around existential problems: “How do people want to buy?” “How does our process need to be or change to support those actions?” “how does our compensation plan in our various organs facilitate behaviours that propel us to our goals?” “How does automation remove gaps in the funnel based on our needed process?” “What target audience ICP parameters should be shared across sales and marketing?” “what mechanisms can be set up to find leaks in the revenue funnel?” “how do we use those mechanisms to find reporting structures that outline root causes and point us to proper interventions?” along with other questions.

The firm foundation is set, and after we have aligned, it's a different question to ask when you say—“how should we handle MQLs?” So much of the friction we see in the consulting we do with large enterprises and start-ups results from organisations making decisions motivated by an "organizational self-interest" (or at least a limited, somewhat biased perspective). If I am in Marketing, operationally, I need ABC. If I am in Sales, operationally, I need XYZ. Unknowingly, they create a "potassium chloride" -like interaction with their counteracting plans, detracting from what drives business forward in their target market. Another huge deficit is very little clarity for teams globally across all verticals and Sales Engagement platforms around this crucial topic: “How does the sequence structure and execution of tasks to the right personas impact conversion?” Companies have so many sequences, all of different varieties of structuressteps and varying throttles, and they have no visibility into the impact of sequences across the funnel (inbound vs. outbound).

If you could wave a magic wand, what would be the one thing you'd resolve to reduce this friction?

If I had a magic wand, I would give everyone three wishes with a personal genie. That way, they could have the chance to fix all their problems, and we could see who used their three wishes creatively the best. 🧞‍♂️

Ha, I'm just kidding. I would wave my magic wand to tear down the walls between operations and enablement by ensuring every company team had a headcount for a rev ops leader with approval, budget and the drive to execute in cross-functional ways. As a bonus, I could force every ops and enablement leader, manager, and individual contributor to go through a required boot camp (like a "hunter's safety course") for how to run your org cohesively and help share these principles.

How will the SDR role evolve over the next 2-3 years?

This is a loaded question with many things to say to answer it correctly. The most straightforward answer: SDRs will do many things they have not historically done and will not do many things they have historically done. Apparent factors that take the cake:

• The onslaught of AI being incorporated into sales
• Shifts in Gmail limits that facilitate adjustments across the board
• So many more companies will be doing SDR work (the magic of sales development used to be, in part it was an art that was lesser understood in some portions of many industries - this will change
• So many more ops people are being hired than ever before (companies are waking up to smell the coffee of Rev Ops)
• So many more data points to be utilized in the prospecting motion, and new vendors and configurations make the accuracy of prospecting more and more precise
• The new generation of SDRs is different from the old guard, both in good and bad ways (they will be more advanced technologically as statistically speaking, there are more digital natives, but I predict they will also be more apt to be reactive and dependent on technology, creating a complacency that can't be accounted for by technology alone)

So, in sum, it's they will do more of some things and less of others, but it's also the reasons why and the surrounding context that matters.

What are you looking to achieve with OneView?

We are creating a platform geared toward helping teams find what works with their sequences and do more of it. We do this in several ways, beginning with our AI and data ingestion--we pull all the sequence data and associated info about the records in the database, the messaging being used on them, and the efficiency of the team with those ICP accounts and contacts. From there, we create clear pathways to create lasting change and constant iteration on the GTM motion so your content and strategy can stay tightly aligned with your GTM scenario plan. We can even predict exactly how many emails you will send daily based on the email steps in all your sequences.

In conclusion, I feel this industry has given a lot to me, and I hope to give back. We do free audits and help for companies globally. We'd love to help as teams transition to a new Gmail situation; we know it can be stressful, but it doesn't need to be with the right resources.

Earn free merch 🎁 

You can get free stuff for referring friends and colleagues to our newsletter 👇️ 

1 referral - Linkedin Shout out 🔊 
5 referrals - Mastering Sales Development Stickers 🎉 
10 referrals - Free Copy of Closing the Gap 📖 
15 referrals - Limited Edition Mastering Sales Development mug 🍵 

You currently have 0 referrals, only 1 away from receiving a Linkedin Shout out!.

Copy & Paste this link: https://saleswise.beehiiv.com/subscribe?ref=PLACEHOLDER

GOOD READS
Book of the week

As loyal readers of Mastering Sales Development, I want to give you 33% off my ebook: use the promo code EARLYADOPTER at checkout! This promo code is until 31st Dec.

LASTLY
And Finally!